Don Allred's Country 07 Comments Pt. 2Ditto Billie Holiday's Rare & Live Recordings 1934-1959, clipped froma thousand tapes, smokey and succinct, expressive and reticent,brooding and shiny, romantic and austere, waiting for the rightconnection, like the shadow of an old car, passing over whatevercondition the country road's in: however far the rest of the car mayor did make it, the shadow's still passing, still waiting. (And I'mstill listening: three discs in, several hours of my life, years ofhers, and she still doesn't sound mannered or wasted.)But today I'm in the diner, finally getting what I'm always beingserved, which is the nasality-as-gentle-astringency (previouslyperceived as "an industrial-strength solvent"), theeverywhere-at-once, yet tastefully compressed hardshell hardsell: thetirelessly, carefully flattened, signature hills of Sugarland. Today,it's a little closer to home, like tabasco on a spud, which is home onthe range, the range of everyday, homely extremes. Can't remember thename of the song, which is one of the ways I know I'm in Sugarland,served up just right, by the shining morning face of Jennifer Nettles,although that smiling busboy's hat has something to do with it too,and today I'm glad to see them both.Jason Isbell sounds to me like the offspring of Warren Zevon andEudora Welty, with both folks' appetite for words, beats, detail,atmosphere, and hooks. But minus Warren's lapses into"Carmelita"-style tearjerking, and plus a sense of justice for hischaracters, of empathy, sympathy, distance (the last needed forperspective, and for room to move on, to the next item on the docket,and the menu). And nobody can find all that in his genes, oranybody's. Possibly doomed in part by heredity (cursed with tenacity, vitalityor at least endurance, under no matter how much stress), BettyeLaVette's character on Scene of The Crime uses all the artist's ownpost-nuclear cockroach tendencies (re improbable return to record binsthe past few years, and not even posthumously). She is one half of theold school Thing That Will Not Die, one of those couples, probablypreserved in alcohol, who draw the world into their drama, for all theworld's the dark end of the street, and we are just players, so getyour helmet, for they're in LOVE. Except that she's not tooself-absorbed, or just enough, to be scared, when she sees what she'sabout to do in another round of "Jealousy." Yet terror's just part ofanother Happy Hour, like that laugh, that cough, that drunken listenershe's accosting, in "Old Talking Soldiers, " an Elton John song shesomewhat asymetrically transforms, typically enough. Ol' Doom makingthe rounds, and the other shapes, stirring the pile: that's country;creativity stirring the stirrer, that's country too (okay, art countrytoo, but tell it to John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, and get anotherbar breath nebula from Bettye, with Spooner Oldham on the pianoforte,Drive-By Truckers picking up).(Pt. 3 follows)